Sunday, December 11, 2011

Afrika Speaks with Alkebu-Lan 12/12/11 - Is the British Police Force Corrupt and Racist?

Our Special guests are: Stafford Scott,
a consultant on racial equality and community engagement and an
organiser with the Tottenham Defence Campaign. He was also co-founder
of the Broadwater Farm
Defence Campaign in 1985 and recently stepped down from the community
panel monitoring the investigation into the death of Mark Duggan, who
was killed by police in August. Superintendent Leroy Logan MBE has been with the Metropolitan Police Service for
over 28 years. He is currently Olympic Policing Co-ordination Team and
is a former Deputy Borough Commander of Hackney in London. Supt. Logan
is also a founder Member and Past Chair of both the National and London
Black Police Associations and is currently on the Executive of the
London association. In 2007 he founded Reallity, a social enterprise
that works towards building capacity and capability in young people
through
faith based mentoring, working in partnership with likemended statutory
/ non-stautory organisations and individuals. A representative from the IPCC (invited)

Hear weekly discussions and lively debate on all issues affecting the Afrikan community, at home and abroad.

We talk it straight and make it plain!

This weeks show Monday 12th Dec 2011

Afrika
Speaks with Alkebu-Lan this week continues with an examination of
racism and corruption with the UK police force. Listeners will recall
that part one dealt extensively with the case of the wrongly imprisoned
Cardiff 3 and the recent collapse of the £30m trial of 8 former South
Wales police officers who undertook the original investigation
and were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The
trial was halted, when it emerged
that some key evidence was either “missing” or destroyed. This event
is only the latest episode of questionable practice that seems to run
through the UK police service. In fact, according to a 14/02/10 Guardian article
by Sandra Laville “the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA)is
assessing the scale of corruption within the British police after
concerns were raised by senior internal investigators.”

If
the SOCA assessment is ongoing it will presumably include the
suspension in Mosiah (Aug) of
Cleveland Police's chief constable Sean Price and his deputy Derek
Bonnard as a result of their arrest pending an investigation into
allegations of fraud and corruption in the service. The same
investigation also prompted the resignation of the Chairman of the
Cleveland Police Authority, Cllr Dave McLuckie.

To
illustrate the fact that that corruption is not limited to the
provinces, the biggest recent casualties were the UK’s top policeman,
Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and
Assistant Commissioner John Yates who both resigned in July in the wake
of the ongoing press/phone hacking scandal and the questionable
relationship they had with senior officers the News International
group. In spite of Stephenson’s declaration that: “I and the people who
know me know that my integrity is completely intact.” He was unable to
whether the storm caused by his association with Neil Wallis, former
deputy editor of the now defunct News of the World (NOTW), later hired
as a PR consultant for the MPS, who was arrested as part of the new
investigation into phone hacking. For his part, Yates became
increasingly under fire for overseeing a woefully inadequate 2009 review
into the original 2006 phone hacking investigation in which he
suggested that no further action be taken as well as his failure to take
adequate action against officers who were known to have illegally
accepted bribes. One victim of the NOTW hacking,
former Army intelligence officer Ian Hurst was damning of the MPS:
“Fundamentally, what lays behind this whole cesspit - not since 2006, it
predates it by many years before that - we're dealing with
institutionalised corruption. It's endemic within the Metropolitan
police and that has to be dealt with."

A
few weeks after Stephenson’s resignation Bro. Mark Duggan was shot and
killed by police marksmen. Not untypically in cases of Afrikans dying
at the hands of the police, a campaign of misinformation ensued
(aided and abetted by a willing media and assisted in the early stages
by the Independent Police Complaints Authority - IPCC) that
characterised Duggan as a notorious gangster who engaged the police in a
gun battle. The reality is that Duggan had no previous convictions,
the only shots fired were police shots and no forensic evidence has been
that he was carrying a gun.

The
IPCC facilitated a community panel to monitor the investigation into
the killing but has this been rocked by the recent resignations of two
of
the three panel members - Stafford Scott, organiser of the Tottenham
Defence Campaign, and John Noblemunn, chairman of Haringey Black
Independent Advisory Group. Scott and Noblemunn quit over their
assertion that the taxi that Bro. Duggan was travelling in before he was
shot was removed from the scene and returned before investigators
arrived. But IPCC chairman Len Jackson rejected these claims as
“inaccurate, misleading and more importantly, irresponsible” and risk
“undermining the integrity of public confidence” into the investigation.

However
, “Integrity” and “confidence” may not be notions the Emmanuels, still
grieving from the March death family member David (aka Smiley Culture),
would align to the IPCC in the wake of their investigation into his
death. The IPCC regarded the four officers at the scene when the 1980s
music star allegedly stabbed himself through the heart during a police
raid, as witnesses rather than suspects and thus were never formally
interviewed. Indeed, according to IPCC commissioner Mike Franklin, the
investigation “found no evidence that a criminal offence may have been
committed. The investigation [also] found there were no individual
failings which, for the purposes of the [Police (Conduct) Regulations
2008], amounted to misconduct,” even though the singer was handcuffed after the
stabbing took place. Merlin
Emmanuel, the reggae star’s nephew, said his family has reacted to the
IPCC findings with "anger, resentment and resilience" and accused the
body of treating them with "contempt." The family have also only been
granted access to a summary the IPCC report, rather then the full
report, on the instruction of the coroner.

Although
Stephen Lawrence was murdered at the hands of a racist gang of young
thugs, rather than MPS, there is a widespread perception that his
killers are still at large because of its
“institutional racism.” The current murder trial of two the mob, Gary
Dobson, and David Norris is largely due to the emergence of new DNA
evidence linking them to Stephen Lawrence. But the possibility of a
conviction being scuppered by the police again reared its head in late
November. Police forensic scientist Yvonne Turner admitted in court
that she inadvertently labelled the clothing with the case number of an
unrelated robbery, meaning some case records had been difficult to find
for up to two years and stated: "I wasn't concentrating and I wasn't
focused at the stage when I wrote the case number in." She also
confessed that the errors in her notes were "very irregular." This
could be a costly admission given that the defence case is based on
claims of contaminated evidence.

Even
away from death and imprisonment, the Afrikan community’s encounter
with the police has historically been characterised by racism - from
Notting Hill in 1958 (or even 1976), Brixton 1981 to the present. Yet
it wasn’t until the publication of the McPherson Report of the Stephen
Lawrence Inquiry in 1999 that the host community had to confront the
fact that the police were “institutionally racist.” It was a situation
that caused the MPS to claim that fear of being called racist
subsequently hindered them from doing their job effectively. However,
the facts have never borne this out as the stop and search rates of
Afrikans, for example, have continued to increase even as the proportion of these stops leading to arrests has declined.

It
could be argued that those best placed to assess the progress of the
MPS in the area of race relations are those on the inside. The
Metropolitan Black Police Association is one such grouping and even they
have had their challenges over
the years that have caused them in the past to boycott MPS “ethnic
minority” recruitment drives and which led the then Chair, Alfred John,
to proclaim in February last year the force was still racist, “Without a
doubt. There is no two ways about that.” Since then a report
commissioned by the Mayor of London into racism in the force has been
published including 10 recommendations which, it asserts if implemented,
if accepted and acted upon, “all officers and staff will benefit and
that the MPS itself will become stronger and more effective.” It is not
clear the extent to which any of the recommendations have been accepted
or implemented and if they were what impact it would have on the
community.